Call for Papers (CFPs) by Asma Mehan
Women's Health, 2025
Description
The rapid urbanization of the 21st century presents both opportunities and challenges... more Description
The rapid urbanization of the 21st century presents both opportunities and challenges for women’s health and well-being. Cities serve as centers of economic and social empowerment, yet urban environments often reinforce structural inequalities that disproportionately affect women. This Special Collection aims to explore the intersection of urban planning, architecture, and public health from a gendered perspective, addressing issues such as access to healthcare, gender-responsive urban policies, the impact of climate change on women’s health, and spatial justice. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that investigate urban infrastructures, public spaces, housing policies, and transportation systems as they relate to women's health outcomes.
Key submission information
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Potential topics include: Feminist urbanism and the right to the city
Health disparities in urban settings and their gendered dimensions
The impact of housing precarity on maternal and reproductive health
Gender-sensitive planning in emergency and disaster resilience
Public spaces, safety, and mental well-being
Access to healthcare and reproductive rights in urban contexts
The role of digital and smart city innovations in addressing women’s health inequities
This collection seeks to contribute to a more inclusive urban future by bridging research across urban studies, gender studies, public health, and policy design. We invite scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to submit empirical and theoretical contributions that advance the discourse on gender and urban health.
All articles in this Special Collection will undergo peer review in line with the journal's standard peer review policies. All submissions to this collection will be subject to an Article Processing Charge (find more info here). Authors may be eligible for a discounted APC through our Open Access Agreements. Check if your institution has an Open Access Agreement with Sage here. Authors from institutions without an agreement may still be eligible for a discount and should check the Gold OA waiver policy.
Guest Editor information
Lead Guest Editor:
Dr Asma Mehan
Texas Tech University,
United States
asma.mehan@ttu.edu
Dr. Asma Mehan is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab) at Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University, USA. Her research explores the intersections of architecture, urbanism, and social justice, with a focus on adaptive reuse, community engagement, and the politics of urban space. She has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of PlaNext: Next Generation Planning. Dr. Mehan actively contributes to international academic discourse through her work on urban resilience, feminist urbanism, and cultural heritage.
Religions, 2022
Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue of Religions aims to re-think and re-contextualise the notio... more Dear Colleagues,
This Special Issue of Religions aims to re-think and re-contextualise the notion of sacred space, questioning both phenomenological (Eliade) and constructivist (Knott) approaches. With this in mind, this issue hopes to study, analyse and map different intellectual and religious perspectives concerning the spatiality of religious practice and the notion of the sacred space itself.
Furthermore, this Special Issue intends to provide a dialectical space to foster intellectual exchange and cross-fertilisation among architecture, the built environment, and religious studies. Our focus will shift attention to less-known and marginalized religious traditions utilizing the insights of spatial and religious studies and drawing on the extensive academic literature of religious studies, cultural geography, urban anthropology, architecture and urban sociology, as well as that of the broader humanities, including the social and political sciences.
The goal of the Special Issue is to resituate the now largely discarded historiographical concept of sacred space within the context of an apparently secular, rationalized, pluralistic, and globalized modern world and to ask “How does this concept—or does it—remain generative and how has it been reimagined, repurposed, and reinscribed with new and surprising meanings in order to fit the changing historical situation?” To achieve this, our focus is intentionally interdisciplinary, bringing together different discourses and specialists to go beyond traditional academic disciplinary aggregations. Such an approach was devised with the intent of evolving our understanding of the concept of sacred space outside of phenomenological and constructivist lenses, in hopes of germinating fresh interpretations on the type of space that is and has been referred to as “sacred” in the present and past.
The issue will supplement the already existing reorientation in religious studies that have been ongoing for the last three decades, namely, material and spatial turns, which seek to interpret religious phenomena outside the traditional categories of dogma, belief, and ritual practice, focusing instead on configurations of space and relations, how religions ideas are lived out in a concrete way and how they are instantiated materially and socially. As an interdisciplinary issue, we hope this collection of research will also contribute to building bridges between academic disciplines, will the aim of reinvigorating dialogue between religious studies and built-environment-related disciplines.
Dr. Krzysztof Nawratek
Dr. Asma Mehan
Dr. Aaron French
Guest Editors
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Call for Papers (CFPs) by Asma Mehan
The rapid urbanization of the 21st century presents both opportunities and challenges for women’s health and well-being. Cities serve as centers of economic and social empowerment, yet urban environments often reinforce structural inequalities that disproportionately affect women. This Special Collection aims to explore the intersection of urban planning, architecture, and public health from a gendered perspective, addressing issues such as access to healthcare, gender-responsive urban policies, the impact of climate change on women’s health, and spatial justice. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that investigate urban infrastructures, public spaces, housing policies, and transportation systems as they relate to women's health outcomes.
Key submission information
Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
Potential topics include: Feminist urbanism and the right to the city
Health disparities in urban settings and their gendered dimensions
The impact of housing precarity on maternal and reproductive health
Gender-sensitive planning in emergency and disaster resilience
Public spaces, safety, and mental well-being
Access to healthcare and reproductive rights in urban contexts
The role of digital and smart city innovations in addressing women’s health inequities
This collection seeks to contribute to a more inclusive urban future by bridging research across urban studies, gender studies, public health, and policy design. We invite scholars, practitioners, and policymakers to submit empirical and theoretical contributions that advance the discourse on gender and urban health.
All articles in this Special Collection will undergo peer review in line with the journal's standard peer review policies. All submissions to this collection will be subject to an Article Processing Charge (find more info here). Authors may be eligible for a discounted APC through our Open Access Agreements. Check if your institution has an Open Access Agreement with Sage here. Authors from institutions without an agreement may still be eligible for a discount and should check the Gold OA waiver policy.
Guest Editor information
Lead Guest Editor:
Dr Asma Mehan
Texas Tech University,
United States
asma.mehan@ttu.edu
Dr. Asma Mehan is an Assistant Professor and Director of the Architectural Humanities and Urbanism Lab (AHU_Lab) at Huckabee College of Architecture, Texas Tech University, USA. Her research explores the intersections of architecture, urbanism, and social justice, with a focus on adaptive reuse, community engagement, and the politics of urban space. She has authored multiple peer-reviewed publications and serves as the Editor-in-Chief of PlaNext: Next Generation Planning. Dr. Mehan actively contributes to international academic discourse through her work on urban resilience, feminist urbanism, and cultural heritage.
This Special Issue of Religions aims to re-think and re-contextualise the notion of sacred space, questioning both phenomenological (Eliade) and constructivist (Knott) approaches. With this in mind, this issue hopes to study, analyse and map different intellectual and religious perspectives concerning the spatiality of religious practice and the notion of the sacred space itself.
Furthermore, this Special Issue intends to provide a dialectical space to foster intellectual exchange and cross-fertilisation among architecture, the built environment, and religious studies. Our focus will shift attention to less-known and marginalized religious traditions utilizing the insights of spatial and religious studies and drawing on the extensive academic literature of religious studies, cultural geography, urban anthropology, architecture and urban sociology, as well as that of the broader humanities, including the social and political sciences.
The goal of the Special Issue is to resituate the now largely discarded historiographical concept of sacred space within the context of an apparently secular, rationalized, pluralistic, and globalized modern world and to ask “How does this concept—or does it—remain generative and how has it been reimagined, repurposed, and reinscribed with new and surprising meanings in order to fit the changing historical situation?” To achieve this, our focus is intentionally interdisciplinary, bringing together different discourses and specialists to go beyond traditional academic disciplinary aggregations. Such an approach was devised with the intent of evolving our understanding of the concept of sacred space outside of phenomenological and constructivist lenses, in hopes of germinating fresh interpretations on the type of space that is and has been referred to as “sacred” in the present and past.
The issue will supplement the already existing reorientation in religious studies that have been ongoing for the last three decades, namely, material and spatial turns, which seek to interpret religious phenomena outside the traditional categories of dogma, belief, and ritual practice, focusing instead on configurations of space and relations, how religions ideas are lived out in a concrete way and how they are instantiated materially and socially. As an interdisciplinary issue, we hope this collection of research will also contribute to building bridges between academic disciplines, will the aim of reinvigorating dialogue between religious studies and built-environment-related disciplines.
Dr. Krzysztof Nawratek
Dr. Asma Mehan
Dr. Aaron French
Guest Editors